Buckling Analysis of Grid-Stiffened Composite Shells

There is a renewed interest in grid-stiffened composite structures; they are not only competitive with conventional stiffened constructions and sandwich shells in terms of weight but also enjoy superior damage tolerance properties. In this paper, both global and local structural instabilities are investigated for grid-stiffened composite panels using homogenization theory. Characteristic cell configurations with periodic boundary constraints are employed for orthogrid- and isogrid-stiffened shells in order to smear the stiffened panel into an equivalent unstiffened shell. Homogenized properties corresponding to classical lamination theory are obtained by matching the strain energy of the stiffened and equivalent cells. Global buckling analysis is carried out based on the homogenized shell properties. Bloch wave theory is adopted to calculate the local buckling load of grid-stiffened shells, where the interaction of adjacent cells is fully taken into account. Moreover, instead of considering skin buckling and stiffener crippling separately, as is commonly done, the skin and stiffeners are assembled together at the level of the characteristic cell. The critical instabilities can be captured whether they are related to the skin or stiffener or their interaction. The proposed combination of global/local models can also be used to predict the material failure of a structure. Numerical examples of orthogrid- and isogrid-stiffened isotropic panels show that the local buckling loads predicted by the proposed method match finite element calculations better than semi-analytical methods based on assumptions and idealisations. The proposed method is further validated using typical configurations of flat composite panels and circular composite cylinders.Aerospace Structures & MaterialsAerospace Engineerin